Exhaustion

Image via Wikipedia

For the last week or so, my body has been telling me that it seems to have reached the edge of physical exhaustion. Or something like that.

I think the final straw was a 10K off-road race that me and a few friends ran last Sunday. Tons of people ran, I just didn’t know most of them.

The race became a turning point of sorts for me that has me going through some sort of deep tissue and emotional reevaluation of this campaign and my own motivation.

Upon starting the race, I started with the pack of all other runners going the 10K distance and realized very quickly that they were going much quicker than my normal pace. Considering that the race was about to go vertically up a mountain to the top, I pulled myself back down to my normal pace and settled in for the trudge. It wasn’t bad, especially since my normal runs now a days are on local mountain dirt roads. We passed through some mud flats, which was fun, and began the ascent. Quite a number of folks had misjudged their ability to keep their pace up the side of a mountain, and I passed them on the ascent simply by retaining my normal pace. I wasn’t trying to catch up with anyone, simply trying to make it through and finish the race. By keeping my own pace, I was able to objectively watch what was happening with other runners, which was interesting to me on a number of levels.

At the top of the mountain, I caught up with a new-runner friend, T. We settled into a companionable run together and joked and talked as we ran along. Some people passed us. We rounded on a lose rock bit and some woman with a Corgy came up from behind us, as others had, except she told us to follow her as she knew the course well. We made the mistake of doing so. What the day of the race we thought was a lame-ass 1+ mile detour, I’m relatively certain was a 1.5+ detour. Ultimately, once T realized she was literally leading us down the garden path, we turned around to retrace our steps. We began calling out for help, knowing we were lost. All of the people stationed to help runners in the race had left and we were left to figure it out on our own. By this point, T and I were exhausted, confused, freaked out, a bit scared and angry.

At this point, another man who knew the race happened by walking his dog. He led us to the point we needed to get back on the race route and touched base with race officials to make sure someone was watching out for us. T and I dealt with another point where the race officials were there, but ignored us, so we ran up and down a road for a bit before we realized we needed to cross at some point and we got them to turn around to give us directions.

By this point nearly the entire field of runners was waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy ahead of us. Our pace was blown and at this point we were simply trying to stay upright. T threw out the idea of truncating our run before we collapsed. We agreed to finish it together and no matter what the actual time was, because we did the race for ourselves, not for the race officials who were timing us. At this point, the aim was simply to legitimately cross the finish line.

We ultimately found out that one other runner came in behind us – an 83 year old man. Upon seeing the times, someone joked that the only person behind us was a man of such an advanced age.

Since then, I’ve done Zumba Fitness twice and run a couple of times. None of the workouts has been good. I’ve listened to talk during the runs, and become increasingly dejected.

Then, this morning, I went on my normal four mile Sunday run with a few friends. Most of them are fantastic runners. Of course, they’d never say that; but they are and they really impress me. T just started running after I did. And she’s just quitting smoking. She’s really doing well, and I’m really impressed by her on a number of levels, as I am of all of these amazing local runners.  I get a kick out of seeing their progress and cheering them on.

So we were all running along today and of course everyone passed me. Everyone. I started thinking about my barefoot running shoes and how they have no forward bounce (they’re barefoot for goodness sake), how T is 5 inches shorter than me or some such and really outdistances me, how folks talk about time and pace, and I generally slog along at my own pace and might as well be called the caboose.

Then I started thinking about why I’m running and what I’m trying to accomplish: how I want my daughter to see and feel her mommy incorporating fitness into her everyday life and thus teach her that she should too; how I want to lose more weight, but have already lost so much and so many inches that some of my old clothes are lose or too baggy to wear; how with the running I’m amazed at the distances I can go; how it’s never been about time for me, but rather to see how long I can make my body move; how I started this entire adventure with exergaming 10 months ago to see whether one could get fit simply by exergaming and have accomplished that goal by proving that one can and does.

During the run today, my body ached for the first time - really ached. One of my knees gave me a slight limp and my legs felt pain. Normally my legs don’t feel any pain during or after my runs. All day, my gluts, hips and leg muscles have felt…well, I’ve felt all of them. It seems like mentally and physically, my mind and body are going through a self assessment and reconsolidation of effort regarding working out as though I’m about to move into a new mental and physical space. We’ll see.

One thing that’s certain, I’m not competing with anyone else or the clock; this campaign continues to be about pushing myself through known and artificial limits toward personal achievement.